Feeding Baba Yaga

I have two best girlfriends who are in a very similar predicament to my own. We are in our forties and we all have health problems dating back to our twenties and the years in between have been endurance challenges. We have each also spent those decades taking care of our families of origin, especially our fathers.

And we are all spent.

So I was trying to think of what we need, of how we could rekindle ourselves. Last year I proposed that we sort of report to each other once a week on what we had done that week that was feminine and creative, something that was for ourselves, and not for others.

This year I am thinking that the task is to find ways to refuel ourselves and to get our fire re-lit. I turned to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book “Women Who Run with the Wolves” and randomly opened a page. (I had gotten a new bookshelf thinking this would solve some of my worldly problems but alas it made some of my problems only become clearer. I have too many books. Also, too many cats. Also, two many headaches.) I say too many because the books, cats, and headpains make me feel overwhelmed instead of blessed with abundance.

It’s the same with people. If there were only half the people here in suburbia I might love them all. But as many as there are, I don’t like any of them. At least not the ones driving at me in their Yukons and Escalades while talking on their cell phones.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes:

“A wise woman keeps her psychic environ uncluttered.”

“To cook for Baba Yaga, we ask literally, how does one feed the Baba Yaga of the psyche, what does one feed so wild a Goddess?

“To cook for the Yaga one must arrange that one's creative life has a consistent fire under it.”

“Women’s cycles according to Vasalisa’s tasks are these: to cleanse one’s thinking, renewing one’s values, on a regular basis. To clear one’s psyche of trivia, sweep one’s self, clean up one’s thinking and feeling states on a regular basis. To build an enduring fire beneath the creative life, and cook up ideas on a systematic basis, means especially to cook, and with originality, a lot of unprecedented life in order to feed the relationship between oneself and the wildish nature.”

How might we all do this?

The kid’s book was making me snow-blind. I could not see it anymore. It is back in a drawer. But I will think how I can better do my creative work.

The medicine I have loved most, the medicine of walking, has been lost to me in the past year as my head had begun to hurt worse when I walk. To lose that is partly to lose my life. I love walking. Walking is me, my rhythm and dance. My left leg has also struggled like my head has, but how can so much be wrong with me? How did my flesh and bone so dis-integrate? How did I get so hobbled? I may need to borrow someone’s magic chicken legs.

But I have a car again.
And it’s a parade float with music.
I can move along singing through the world.

The last car was a sea horse. This car is a land horse.

A Percheron, on the outside anyway.
On the inside it’s a manatee.

And I must say also, I feel the wheel pull hard to the west.

But will I have to leave Hades underground?
Can he come with me?

I bought daffodils. And they are cupping all available sunshine, capturing all the light they can.

Isn’t sunshine a kind of fire?